Italy is starting to find its way to branded entertainment

In the last few months, I noticed some very good examples of branded content strategies which involve some of the greatest so-called Youtube Stars. In Italy there are not so many attempts of  well-made products, in particular when it comes about the use of videos. The first case i want to speak about is the union between Playstation and The Pills, an extremely famous web-series (lately landed even on Tv) whose protagonists are three young romans; for these three episodes, which basically follow the usual structure, there’s also a special guest, Alessandro Florenzi, the new symbol of the A.S. Roma football team. I think The Pills are incredible writers, and these videos don’t reduce the standard, they’re in italian, but you can find them on the Playstation Planet Youtube Channel. Beyond, The Pills also shared many posts on Facebook in which they were playing with the console.

Alessandro Florenzi (right) and Rosetta, a frequent guest of The Pills

The Jackal is an agency of young video-producers based in Naples; they started making funny film parodies on Youtube; now, they are among the main producers of viral-videos (whichever the definition is) in Italy. On their Youtube channel there are many “fomats” for short videos, like Vrenzole (it means not exactly “a good girl” in the neapolitan dialect) in which two “ladies” discuss about the main events in Italy on their balconies. Another series is based on the classic trick expectation vs. reality. This time the strategy has been set for the launch of a film, X-Men: Days of  future past; in the videos, the protagonist faces the situations he’s involved in using the powers of the famous super-heroes, proposing exactly the model normally used. In this case, the videos are available on one of The Jackal‘s Youtube channel,  where they usually publish all the sponsored videos; this way, the production has taken advantage of the incredible numbers of subscribers they already have on Youtube (more than 150K on the main and over 44K for the subsidiary, The Jackal Shit).

Ciro from The Jackal for X-Men days of  future past

These two examples have impressed me so well because this time brands tried, in my opinion successfully, to enter into the normal creative process of these young video-producers, letting they to shape their brands and not the opposite.